Carey Cavanaugh

Background and education

Cavanaugh grew up in the Jacksonville Beaches (primarily Atlantic Beach). His mother—Sylvia Cavanaugh Ponti—was an artist and a writer; his father was a U.S. Navy non-commissioned officer. After his parents' divorce, he moved with his mother to Italy for two years before the family returned to Florida. He began studying Russian in ninth grade at Duncan U. Fletcher High School in Neptune Beach and, after briefly starting with nuclear engineering, majored in Russian at the University of Florida. There he was a member of Delta Chi fraternity. In 1975 he also studied briefly at Leningrad Polytechnical Institute. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in 1976.

He went on to graduate study in government and international affairs at the University of Notre Dame, receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1978. He continued work toward a Ph.D, but left before completion in 1981 to accept a tenure-track position teaching international affairs and Soviet and East European studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio. In the summer of 1982 he was an intern and in 1983 a visiting researcher at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich.

Cavanaugh later attended the U.S. Army Russian Institute (today the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies) in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany in 1988 - 1989 and was a fellow of MIT's Center for International Studies' Seminar XXI in 1994-1995. In 2001-2002, he was a member of the Department of State's 44th Senior Seminar. At the Foreign Service Institute, he also studied German and Italian.

Government service

Entering the Foreign Service in 1984, Cavanaugh rose to the rank of Minister Counselor, with a career focused on conflict resolution, arms control, assistance, and humanitarian issues. His first tour of duty was at the U.S. Mission to Berlin (West) where he worked primarily on consular affairs and political reporting on Iran. This was followed by assignment to the Office of Soviet Affairs in Washington to handle bilateral relations and some arms control issues, including implementation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Afterwards, as a political officer at the American Embassy in Moscow, he was responsible for Soviet relations towards Europe (in particular the Two Plus Four Agreement on German unification), arms control issues (the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe), and the new USSR Supreme Soviet Defense and State Security Committee. He worked directly with Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wisconsin) and House Committee on Armed Services members to instruct their Supreme Soviet counterparts on how to perform legislative oversight.

In 1991-92, he was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, working with Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) on nuclear weapons issues. When Eduard Shevardnadze became President of the Republic of Georgia in 1992, Cavanaugh was sent to Tbilisi as Chargé d'affaires, leading the team that established the U.S. embassy to that new independent state. After Tbilisi, Cavanaugh was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Rome to cover the communist and socialist parties, the Lega Nord, as well as European policy issues. The State Department cut short this assignment to return him to Washington to help with the multibillion-dollar assistance program for the former Soviet Union and shortly thereafter to support U.S. and international efforts to advance peace in the Caucasus, working with Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson and Finnish diplomat and European Union Special Representative Heikki Talvitie.

Under the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Cavanaugh spearheaded or helped advance peace efforts involving Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Turkey. Selected by Richard Holbrooke to serve as Director of Southern European Affairs, he was part of the team that helped prevent – via telephone – a potential military confrontation between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean over the disputed islets of Imia/Kardak. Later, serving also as Acting Special Cyprus Coordinator, he received the State Department's James Clement Dunn Award for Excellence for defusing the crisis that arose when Cyprus purchased a Russian S-300 (missile) system capable of striking Turkey. He later dealt with the issue of the handling by Swiss banks of Holocaust-era bank accounts which held deposits made by victims of Nazi persecution, while serving as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland. In 2000, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be Ambassador/Special Negotiator responsible for conflicts in Eurasia and concurrently U.S. Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group. This assignment culminated in OSCE peace talks on Nagorno-Karabakh with the President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliev and the President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan at the Harry S Truman Little White House in Key West, Florida.

Cavanaugh was president of the Department of State's 44th Senior Seminar in 2001-2002. Afterwards, he worked for three years as a senior inspector/team leader in State's Office of the Inspector General. Cavanaugh's final official assignment was foreign policy/political advisor to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Academic work

Cavanaugh was appointed tenured full professor at the University of Kentucky and director of its Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in August 2006. The Patterson School is a highly ranked, selective graduate program (established in 1959) that prepares students for professional careers in international affairs. The school's hallmarks are its intimate size, low cost, and combined focus on diplomacy and business/trade.

Under Cavanaugh's leadership, the size of this master's degree program was capped at 35 new students each year. He grew the program's co-curricular activities so that during their studies each Patterson School student would have the opportunity—at no additional cost—to visit the headquarters or manufacturing operations of 12-15 major corporations in the Midwest and South (such as Aflac, AGCO, Boeing, BP, Coca-Cola, Conagra, General Dynamics, Eli Lilly, Invesco, MillerCoors, Mucci Farms, P&G, Toyota, UPS, and U.S. Steel), US government agencies and foreign diplomatic missions. This includes exposing students directly to the U.S. armed forces with visits to Fort Benning, Fort Knox, and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and to the work of non-governmental organizations such as the Carter Center, Save the Children, or CARE. Cavanaugh also established greater engagement with defense/security entities such as the Department of Energy's Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the United States Army War College. His teaching focuses on diplomacy, negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution; the diplomacy of nuclear weapons; and international ethics.

Current affiliations and activities

Cavanaugh is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London). He serves as a director and trustee of Conciliation Resources, a London-based international non-governmental organization dealing with conflict prevention and peace building. He is also involved in a multi-year effort to address the problem of fraternity hazing on college and university campuses in the United States and Canada, serving on a presidential commission for the North American Interfraternity Conference (NIC) The commissioners' report will impact more than 5,500 fraternity chapters on more than 800 campuses with approximately 350,000 members. Cavanaugh was a member of the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Kennan Institute. and was a founding board member of the Henry Clay Center for Statesmanship (HCCS) in 2007. Until 2013, he was responsible for developing the curriculum for the HCCS's annual student congress. He works periodically with the United States Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership and the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.

Cavanaugh assists the Karabakh Contact Group, a civil society effort (funded by the European Partnership for Nagorno-Karabakh) to build support for a peaceful resolution of this conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and has been engaged in other Track 1.5 & Track 2 diplomacy efforts related to the South Caucasus. He has also carried out special assignments for the State Department's Inspector General in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Brazil, served repeatedly as a senior scholar for IREX (International Research & Exchanges Board) and has been a regular speaker for the American Committees on Foreign Relations. In 2015, Cavanaugh was named by Delta Chi International fraternity as one of two Distinguished Delta Chis based upon his outstanding civic service in higher education and his past and continuing engagement toward advancing international peace. He was tapped as an honorary member of Florida Blue Key (the University of Florida's leadership honor society) in 2017.

Family

Cavanaugh married Laura Kokx of Hart, Michigan in 1981. The couple resides in Lexington, Kentucky. They have two adult sons, Chase (who is Morning Edition producer and a news reporter for Northern Public Radio, NPR affiliate WNIJ in DeKalb, Illinois) and Keith (who is a software developer for Elavon in Atlanta, Georgia). Cavanaugh has two brothers: Terence Cavanaugh (an associate professor of education at the University of North Florida) and James Ponti (a television writer and producer for NBC's Golf Channel, and author of the "Dead City" and "T.O.A.S.T. Mystery" book series Simon & Schuster/Aladdin for young adults).